The present invention provides enhancements for computerized item, service and peer recommendation systems directed toward industry professionals, and corresponding methods. In particular, the present invention relates to methods and systems for improving engagement with a recommendation engine that recommends items, peers, and services. The present invention is applicable to other situations involving non industry professionals as well.
Recommendation systems typically maintain (i) a database of declared/explicit profiles of professionals, and (ii) a history of actions taken by professionals within a given field of expertise, and use the combination of (i) and (ii) to recommend, for example, items or peers or additional services. The item recommendations can include, for example, documents to be reviewed, news items and industry announcements, events to attend, search keywords that may be of interest, and the like. A key purpose of the recommendations is to increase engagement between the industry professionals and the entity providing the recommendations by maximizing the value of the recommendations to the end-user (the industry professional).
In addition, various tools for maintaining documentation in various fields are known in the art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,035,838 to Nelson et al. discloses methods and systems for organizing information stored within a computer network-based system. Documentation relating to a plurality of topics and a list of experts on a plurality of topics is stored in a centralized database. A user interface enables a user to search the database for a specific item of information by at least one of a work function, a functional category and a community.
Prior art systems such as those referred to above generally rely on either (i) the user entering information and proactively maintaining and updating the relevance of that information, or (ii) taking actions that can be recorded. Such limitations compromises the ability to provide relevant recommendations to users that do not maintain a certain engagement threshold with the system and either (i) do not enter or maintain information and/or (ii) do not take frequent actions. This is a known challenge for any recommendation engine application, and in particular, those with smaller industry specific target audiences where it is impossible to predict the user's profile if their engagement with the system is below such a threshold (due to insufficient statistics). As a result, such prior art recommendation engines may provide a broad spectrum of marginally relevant choices of information, which can be overwhelming. In turn, there is little likelihood that the provided recommendations will break the cycle of disengagement by providing relevant information for the least engaged users.
It would be advantageous to provide improved apparatus and methods for obtaining relevant information that can assist a user in staying current in a profession and/or can assist in solving a business or technical problem. It would be further advantageous to provide such a system that presents highly relevant information to individual users without relying on them (i) explicitly feeding information to an underlying profile and/or (ii) implicitly doing so by interacting with relevant items, peers or services on a consistent basis.
The methods and systems of the present invention provide the foregoing and other advantages. For example, the present invention provides a third source of information for use by a recommendation engine, a passive profile underlying the typical profiles used by a recommendation engine, as well as additional sources of information, for use by the recommendation engine. The present invention does not require the user to take action or enter information in order to receive highly relevant recommendations. In particular, the present invention provides methods and systems for accelerating engagement in least engaged user segments.